All I want to do these days is listen to love songs. The song that's been stuck in my head for at least the past 24 hours is I Won't Say from the animated movie Hercules. (You know the part where Meg's girl choir is accusing her of being in love with Hercules, and since she's been dragged over the coals in the past she won't admit that she loves him? That's the one.) The song that saved me is Melt With You by Modern English. And since that fateful night when I heard it on Delilah, it's been EVERYWHERE.
Actually, I've basically been listening religiously to Delilah, which most likely qualifies as both the disease and the cure.
It might be that I can feel the holiday season coming up. It's Halloween weekend, and I get to wear a costume to work tomorrow night. The region's first snowstorm of the year is also forecast for tomorrow, with wild rumors about 10-24 inches of snow in New Jersey throughout the day -- New Jersey being a mere 7 minutes away from my house. Also, today was frigid, compared to what it has been. Even in the sun it was cold. I really need the snow to hold off, because I need new tires on my car before it comes. (As a matter of interest, this is my latest great talking point for Starting Conversations With Strangers.)
The holidays always make me feel like falling in love. I know I'm not the only one, and that the feeling is one of the most cliche feelings to ever strike human emotions, but there's something about even the image of snowflakes floating down under streetlamps in the hazy winter twilight that makes falling look so nice...
I was totally mind-blown yesterday when Alex used the marvelous term "emotional detox" in an email, as in: "This is the emotional detox I need from four years at [St. Olaf], because there isn't anyone here I want to fall in love with." Brilliant. And semi-fortunate, since I really have been cringing at some of the memories I have of Love At and Around St. Olaf, and I can't think of anything that could be better for me now than a little break from drama and the whole who-was-more-screwed-up-before-we-screwed-each-other-up-even-worse-than-before thing. It's also unfortunate: as he also noted, my straitjacket-esque defense mechanism keeps me from even wanting to talk to anyone, because it seems that he or she will inevitably turn out to be either more screwed up than me and therefore a threat, or less screwed up than me and therefore vulnerable. Besides, the easiest and most fool-proof way to successfully complete an emotional detox program is to not really have any relationships, of any kind, with anyone, because relationships are inevitably complicated and there is always some miscommunication that just ruins the peace.
Ha. I'm still captivated by Modern English and that image of snowflakes falling underneath a streetlamp... Preferably one of those old, hand-lit cast iron ones, represented in Kincaidian brushstrokes...
It may come as a comfort to you that all my ranting and griping here actually does get me somewhere in life. All that talk about vocation worked some magic on my self-image -- after a six-hour plunge into what felt like intense depression yesterday, which I decided was brought on by a combination of dehydration and widespread belly-laugh shortages. I'm forcing myself to get comfy, so now my real personality is rapidly coming into focus for the benefit of the DE crowd. For example, I took a break with The Partners yesterday to do the twist, and when the Boss-man teased me about it, I told him he hasn't seen the half of it. "The half of what," he asked, cracking up, "your dancing abilities?" That's right. My dancing abilities. I've got the moves like Jagger.
I love dancing, remember? And Zumba. I really try to recommend it to every person I ever talk to. Also, I should really just win VH1's Motormouth right now, because I've taken to belting along with those power ballads Delilah plays when I'm driving home at night -- to the extent that I often get distracted wondering how Adele's vocal cords got to the point of hemorrhaging. That's not a joke, and if it was, it wouldn't be funny. I seriously wonder about this.
The human body is a pretty incredible thing.
The crickets have started coming back, after at least a week or two of their notable absence. They're back in spite of my ultrasonic pest control plug-in and my giant, hairy spider friend that recently appeared among my boxes. I tried to keep him in the other room at first, until I realized (a) that my efforts were futile, and (b) that the cricket count seemed to have significantly declined since he turned up. The crickets are so gross. I'm getting pretty good at smashing them with a flyswatter, but they're so juicy and disgusting and I really don't want them to eat my books and/or clothes. (Please do not let this dissuade you, dear friends, from coming to visit me. Like I said, I'm slowly becoming a cricket's worst nightmare.) Otherwise, as my mom keeps reminding me, some cultures consider them good luck, and I'm starting to think that my long, jointy limbs look oddly cricket-like. Speaking of bodies being amazing. That was my segue, just at the wrong end of the paragraph...
I'm starting to recognize some signs of delirium in my writing, perhaps because it's long past my boring post-grad bedtime. So I think I'd better cut this off here before it gets any worse. I need to go dig through my old mix CDs for power ballads anyway. Wish me luck, and boa noite!
Actually, I've basically been listening religiously to Delilah, which most likely qualifies as both the disease and the cure.
It might be that I can feel the holiday season coming up. It's Halloween weekend, and I get to wear a costume to work tomorrow night. The region's first snowstorm of the year is also forecast for tomorrow, with wild rumors about 10-24 inches of snow in New Jersey throughout the day -- New Jersey being a mere 7 minutes away from my house. Also, today was frigid, compared to what it has been. Even in the sun it was cold. I really need the snow to hold off, because I need new tires on my car before it comes. (As a matter of interest, this is my latest great talking point for Starting Conversations With Strangers.)
The holidays always make me feel like falling in love. I know I'm not the only one, and that the feeling is one of the most cliche feelings to ever strike human emotions, but there's something about even the image of snowflakes floating down under streetlamps in the hazy winter twilight that makes falling look so nice...
I was totally mind-blown yesterday when Alex used the marvelous term "emotional detox" in an email, as in: "This is the emotional detox I need from four years at [St. Olaf], because there isn't anyone here I want to fall in love with." Brilliant. And semi-fortunate, since I really have been cringing at some of the memories I have of Love At and Around St. Olaf, and I can't think of anything that could be better for me now than a little break from drama and the whole who-was-more-screwed-up-before-we-screwed-each-other-up-even-worse-than-before thing. It's also unfortunate: as he also noted, my straitjacket-esque defense mechanism keeps me from even wanting to talk to anyone, because it seems that he or she will inevitably turn out to be either more screwed up than me and therefore a threat, or less screwed up than me and therefore vulnerable. Besides, the easiest and most fool-proof way to successfully complete an emotional detox program is to not really have any relationships, of any kind, with anyone, because relationships are inevitably complicated and there is always some miscommunication that just ruins the peace.
Ha. I'm still captivated by Modern English and that image of snowflakes falling underneath a streetlamp... Preferably one of those old, hand-lit cast iron ones, represented in Kincaidian brushstrokes...
It may come as a comfort to you that all my ranting and griping here actually does get me somewhere in life. All that talk about vocation worked some magic on my self-image -- after a six-hour plunge into what felt like intense depression yesterday, which I decided was brought on by a combination of dehydration and widespread belly-laugh shortages. I'm forcing myself to get comfy, so now my real personality is rapidly coming into focus for the benefit of the DE crowd. For example, I took a break with The Partners yesterday to do the twist, and when the Boss-man teased me about it, I told him he hasn't seen the half of it. "The half of what," he asked, cracking up, "your dancing abilities?" That's right. My dancing abilities. I've got the moves like Jagger.
I love dancing, remember? And Zumba. I really try to recommend it to every person I ever talk to. Also, I should really just win VH1's Motormouth right now, because I've taken to belting along with those power ballads Delilah plays when I'm driving home at night -- to the extent that I often get distracted wondering how Adele's vocal cords got to the point of hemorrhaging. That's not a joke, and if it was, it wouldn't be funny. I seriously wonder about this.
The human body is a pretty incredible thing.
The crickets have started coming back, after at least a week or two of their notable absence. They're back in spite of my ultrasonic pest control plug-in and my giant, hairy spider friend that recently appeared among my boxes. I tried to keep him in the other room at first, until I realized (a) that my efforts were futile, and (b) that the cricket count seemed to have significantly declined since he turned up. The crickets are so gross. I'm getting pretty good at smashing them with a flyswatter, but they're so juicy and disgusting and I really don't want them to eat my books and/or clothes. (Please do not let this dissuade you, dear friends, from coming to visit me. Like I said, I'm slowly becoming a cricket's worst nightmare.) Otherwise, as my mom keeps reminding me, some cultures consider them good luck, and I'm starting to think that my long, jointy limbs look oddly cricket-like. Speaking of bodies being amazing. That was my segue, just at the wrong end of the paragraph...
I'm starting to recognize some signs of delirium in my writing, perhaps because it's long past my boring post-grad bedtime. So I think I'd better cut this off here before it gets any worse. I need to go dig through my old mix CDs for power ballads anyway. Wish me luck, and boa noite!
No comments:
Post a Comment